Getting started with DevOps

The term DevOps was introduced in 2007-2009 by Patrick Debois, Gene Kim, and John Willis, and it represents the combination of Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops). It has given rise to a movement that advocates bringing developers and operations together within teams. This is to be able to deliver added business value to users more quickly and hence be more competitive in the market.

DevOps culture is a set of practices that reduce the barriers between developers, who want to innovate and deliver faster, on the one side and, on the other side, operations, who want to guarantee the stability of production systems and the quality of the system changes they make.

DevOps culture is also the extension of agile processes (scrum, XP, and so on), which make it possible to reduce delivery times and already involve developers and business teams, but are often hindered because of the non-inclusion of Ops in the same teams.

The communication and this link between Dev and Ops does, therefore, allow a better follow-up of end-to-end production deployments and more frequent deployments of a better quality, saving money for the company.

To facilitate this collaboration and improve communication between Dev and Ops, there are several key elements in the processes to be put in place, as in the following examples:

• More frequent application deployments with integration and continuous delivery (called CI/CD)
• The implementation and automation of unitary and integration tests, with a process focused on Behavior-Driven Design (BDD) or Test-Driven Design (TDD)
• The implementation of a means of collecting feedback from users
• Monitoring applications and infrastructure

The DevOps movement is based on three axes:

• The culture of collaboration: This is the very essence of DevOps—the fact that teams are no longer separated by silos specialization (one team of developers, one team of Ops, one team of testers, and so on), but, on the contrary, these people are brought together by making multidisciplinary teams that have the same objective: to deliver added value to the product as quickly as possible.
• Processes: To expect rapid deployment, these teams must follow development processes from agile methodologies with iterative phases that allow for better functionality quality and rapid feedback. These processes should not only be integrated into the development workflow with continuous integration but also into the deployment workflow with continuous delivery and deployment. The DevOps process is divided into several phases:
  • The planning and prioritization of functionalities
  • Development
  • Continuous integration and delivery
  • Continuous deployment
  • Continuous monitoring

These phases are carried out cyclically and iteratively throughout the life of the project.

• Tools: The choice of tools and products used by teams is very important in DevOps. Indeed, when teams were separated into Dev and Ops, each team used their specific tools—deployment tools for developers and infrastructure tools for Ops—which further widened communication gaps.

With teams that bring development and operations together, and with this culture of unity, the tools used must be usable and exploitable by all members.

Developers need to integrate with monitoring tools used by Ops teams to detect performance problems as early as possible and with security tools provided by Ops to protect access to various resources.

Ops, on the other hand, must automate the creation and updating of the infrastructure and integrate the code into a code manager; this is called Infrastructure as Code, but this can only be done in collaboration with developers who know the infrastructure needed for applications. Ops must also be integrated into application release processes and tools.

The following diagram illustrates the three axes of DevOps culture—the collaboration between Dev and Ops, the processes, and the use of tools:

So, we can go back to DevOps culture with Donovan Brown's definition (http://donovanbrown.com/post/what-is-devops):

The benefits of establishing a DevOps culture within an enterprise are as follows:

• Better collaboration and communication in teams, which has a human and social impact within the company.
• Shorter lead times to production, resulting in better performance and end user satisfaction.
• Reduced infrastructure costs with IaC.
• Significant time saved with iterative cycles that reduce application errors and automation tools that reduce manual tasks, so teams focus more on developing new functionalities with added business value.